VEGFA and malignant colon neoplasm: neutrophil-derived MMP-9 was found to mediate the release of larger VEGF isoforms not through cleavage but rather, and they demonstrated that MMP-9 was able to release biologically active VEGF165 from the ECM of colon cancer cells via cleavage of acetylheparin sulfate, which promotes tumor angiogenesis (121).